Hello!
My question is:
Is it possible to make a gallery open by clicking on a photo which is NOT a photo from the gallery?

Full explanation of my question:
I have a page which is a photo. I wish to make a part of it clickable, using html Image-mapping, and make that "click" start a gallery.
I do NOT want the photos to show on the page at all, only on the gallery
that opens after clicking on the button.

JimDixon, this is not what I mean.
The question is -
I want only ONE photo from the gallery to show on the page, and once clicked, the SLIDESHOW opens, not a page that shows ALL the photos in the gallery.
And this is a tricky one.
Any ideas?

Uh, you may wanna try this:
- create a gallery
- select a representing gallery image (from Manage Gallery)
- set gallery to start as slideshow
- check the "disable page connection" in NG options
- from NG menu, create an album and drop your gallery in it
- create a page for the album, using shortcode

[album id=XXX]

In that page you should see a list of galleries included in your album, each represented with the image you selected, its title and description (if you provided one): by clicking the gallery image you should see the slideshow opening up in the same page.

Rash & JimD - what i'm aiming at is something else.
I'l give another example ---
I want this page:http://shiracircus.com/fire-and-lights
which has an image-map (could be changed if serves the purpose..), to show the gallery which is on the bottom for now, when ever someone clicks on the link (which is the entire are of the photos).
no extra pages, only one click to open the gallery on top of the screen..

I'm not sure Nextgen can do it, but god knows I'm trying :)
what say you?

after some thinking about it, "what to do" looks simple: add an HTML tag to your image to bring up the gallery; this, after you installed, configured and tested any lightbox/highslide/colorbox plugin.
"How to do it" seems a bit more complicated: I've been trying to manually re-build a standard link to a gallery but no success!
Maybe Alex (Rabe) may address this issue: how do I manually rebuild a standard link to a slideshow?

More details about the manually rebuilt link to the gallery: such a link just opens a modal (highslide, in my case) box with the first picture of the gallery while the rest of the slideshow/gallery seems not loaded. All the necessary jscripts look loaded but this may reveal wrong. You may want to check link code here (test website):